The Lucerne Festival did it in 2010; it is now our turn to welcome the Journées de la Création of the Association Suisse des Musiciens: Archipel offers four intensive days to discover Swiss compositors and performers. This will draw the topography of a country that gathers a continent’s treasures within its borders.

Swiss music reveals an exceptional diversity and vitality: being at the crossroads of German, Italian and French influences; characterized by a network of renowned music schools attracting numerous foreign musicians, in particular from South America and Asia; rich of a dynamic alternative world that renews experimental music. A ‘Swiss’ programming is everything but Helvetic; it is a European programming, crossroads of a continent where a long-standing tradition of welcoming fosters the cultural melting pot.

The panorama is as truthful as possible. Each and every Swiss contemporary music generation is represented, from the undisputed masters (Huber, Holliger, Gaudibert), the departed (Delz, Furrer-Münch), to the youngest (Bianchi, Sinnhuber, Thirvaudey, Jaggi, Vassena), and including the intermediate generation with distinguished international careers (Jarrell, Dayer, Kyburz, Furrer…) and the foreign compositors who settled in Switzerland (Haas, Mundry). Numerous premieres will be like the landmarks of this journey.

A special emphasis will be made on very young musicians who are still students at Geneva, Lausanne, Bern, Zürich and Lugano music schools. It is an exceptional breeding ground: there, Japanese soprano or Swiss cellist meets up Chinese or Columbian compositor. After studying with Jarrell, Dayer, Haas or Mundry, and benefiting from an electroacoustic work session at the Centre de Musique Électronique de Genève or the Zürich Institut for Computer Music and Sound Technology, these young compositors will present their work in our “listening salons” at the Pitoëff Theater (electronic and mix creations by Sylvestre, Vallejos, Elipe, Qian, atoci, Stofer, Kurth, Wetzel, Meyer-König). The festival will also be open to several young soloists educated in Switzerland who have begun a brilliant career: soprano Ayumi Togo, cellist Karolina Öhman, pianist Antoine Françoise, violinist Gian Paolo Peloso…

Open to performing arts and alternative forms, and after a first weekend of literature and theatrical premieres (Haenel, Cadiot, Malaguerra, Aperghis, Bergvall, Encyclopédie de la Parole), Jodlowski’s setting, Archipel will go on exploring contemporary music fringes, those junctions of imagination: slam, sound poetry, improvised music, experimental pop music, noise… With Jonas Kocher and la Cave 12 on the one hand, and the Grütli Theater on the other hand, we offer seven experimental evenings where inventiveness will resound: concerts and performances by Christian Wolfarth, Antoine Chessex, Joke Lanz, Paed Conca/Raed Yassin, Bertrand Denzler, Insubordinations Meta Orchestra… (Pitoëff Theater).

However, traditional concerts are not forgotten, thanks to our faithful partners: Contrechamps, Namascae, Eklekto (former CIP), Vortex, Swiss Chambers Soloists, Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain, Quatuor Diotima, the musicians of Geneva and Lausanne schools, the Phoenix Ensemble from Basel and the Solistes de Lyon (for the first time), and, at last, the return of the Geneva Chamber Orchestra.

All in all, a hundred works – half of them as premieres. A journey full of surprises through the secrets of the Swiss culture. A cartography of a near and distant country, familiar, hidden, isolated, open. During Archipel 2012, forty ‘autochthonous’ compositors will dialogue with as many others who come from twenty different countries. Like the singularity of Swiss culture, made of contradictions, and overcome by debate and reason.